“The international festival restores documentary cinema to its true scale”

Edgar Bagdasaryan – director, screenwriter, producer, and member of the Union of Cinematographers of Armenia – will be joining the jury of the “Khanzhonkov DOC: Front Line” festival for the first time. His professional perspective on the competing works will undoubtedly serve as a unique reflection of the global film industry’s attitude towards contemporary documentary filmmaking.
Ahead of the festival, we spoke with Edgar Bagdasary about the international status of the “Khanzhonkov DOCK: Front Line” project, the specifics of documentary cinema, and the role of this genre in the modern film process.

- Edgar Ernestovich, your filmography demonstrates an impressive range of genres. This includes documentary projects that have received international recognition. In your view, in an era when feature film is chasing after large‑scale franchises and superheroes, how does a documentary filmmaker manage to find an epic scope in the fate of one seemingly unremarkable person?

- Documentary film has an almost unbelievable privilege: for it, every human life is important — sometimes unnoticed, quiet, invisible to the big screen of the entertainment industry. Any one of the eight billion people can become a hero.
A documentary film doesn’t just give a voice to an ordinary person; it transforms a private fact into an artistic generalization. He extracts poetry from what the world attributes to a random confluence of circumstances. Where the news sees a line in the statistics, a good documentary filmmaker discerns ancient drama.

- In your opinion, what is the fundamental difference between how a local audience perceives a film and how an audience at an international festival perceives it?

- The national context too often tells the viewer where to sympathize, where to admire, where to recognize something of their own. An international festival deprives the film of this safety net. There, no one is obliged to automatically understand your cultural codes. No one will love the hero just because he’s one of us. No one will forgive a weakness in form out of respect for the subject.

- But doesn’t the international context change the rules of the game for the director compared to domestic distribution?

- The international festival is also important because it restores documentary cinema to its true scale. It reminds us: private life is not provincial. One person’s pain is not a local story. Humiliation, hope, fear, dignity, memory — all of this can be rooted in a specific land, but it speaks a language that can be heard far beyond its borders. That is why such a project is not a fair of flags, accents, and diplomatic smiles, but a space where human history undergoes its main test — the test of being seen by others.

We remind you that you can submit an application for the 3rd International Festival of Documentary Films, Media Projects, and AI Projects “Khanzhonkov DOC: Front Line” until October 15, inclusive, on the website.
https://t.me/frontlinefest/964